The B.A.T.M.A.N. team proudly presents its newest release, batman-adv 
2012.4.0, mostly dedicating itself to stability with some smaller enhancements 
to improve the user experience. As the kernel module always depends on the 
Linux kernel it was compiled against, it does not make sense to provide 
binaries on our website. As usual, you will find the signed tarballs in our 
download section:

http://downloads.open-mesh.org/batman/releases/batman-adv-2012.4.0/

as well as prepackaged binaries in your distribution.


Thanks
------

Thanks to all people sending in patches:

  * Antonio Quartulli <[email protected]>
  * Def <[email protected]>
  * Jonathan Corbet <[email protected]>
  * Linus Lüssing <[email protected]>
  * Marek Lindner <[email protected]>
  * Martin Hundebøll <[email protected]>
  * Simon Wunderlich <[email protected]>
  * Sven Eckelmann <[email protected]>


batman-adv
----------

The translation table (the core system for managing all non-mesh clients 
across the mesh network) has been supplemented by the "speedy join" mechanism. 
Speedy join was designed to make the location of non-mesh clients known 
throughout the mesh without depending on OGM messages. As soon as non-mesh 
clients issue a DHCP or ARP request or any other broadcast message they are 
immediately full participants of the network. This will lead to a faster 
network connection experience, especially when the mesh network has been 
configured with higher OGM intervals.
All remaining traffic counters were converted to the recently introduced 
traffic counting framework and its ethtool API, thereby completely replacing 
the old traffic counter mechanism for the purpose of better scalability. The 
bridge loop avoidance comes with an additional backbone gateway table 
(exported via debugfs) allowing to retrieve the list of all detected backbone 
gateways attached to the same LAN, regardless of whether or not it has claimed 
any non-mesh client. 

Several reports about packet loss in combination with vlan tagging encouraged 
us to investigated the cause. A bug was found in the Linux kernel vlan code 
and a patch was submitted. At the same time a workaround was added to our out-
of-tree kernel module which automatically takes effect for kernel versions 
older than Linux 3.8 (which contains the proper fix). This release also comes 
with a few bug fixes concerning the batman-adv code directly: with the intent 
of suppressing duplicate broadcast packets in the mesh the bridge loop 
avoidance computes CRC checksums for each broadcast packet it receives and 
compares them to a list of already received broadcast checksums. The check-
summing code miscalculated the CRC leading to overly aggressive broadcast 
packet drops. Also addressed was the missing "no purge" flag for the batX mac 
addresses after manually changing its mac address. The code refactoring 
regression leading to route flapping in multiple interfaces setup was 
corrected along with wrong OGM counting on Intel x86. 


batctl
------

As gradually more functionality of the batman-adv kernel module is optional 
and can be compiled out, batctl won't be able to find the corresponding files 
in sysfs or debugfs. Therefore, batctl now maintains a list of optional 
features and informs the user about a possibly deactivated optional feature. 
At the same time the sysfs / debugfs code has been refactored to remove 
redundant boilerplate code. Also removed was the code querying the traffic 
statistics through the old API because all statistics can be retrieved via the 
new API. The batctl utility also gained an option to display the newly added 
backbone gateway table.


Happy routing,
The B.A.T.M.A.N. team

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